Amazon Snowmobile lets you move up to 100PB of data per truck

Posted on Friday, December 02 2016 @ 13:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
In 1980s, Andrew Tanenbaum said you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. Despite massive increases in Internet bandwidth over the last decades, it seems this still rings true as Amazon just rolled out the AWS Snowmobile, a new exabyte-scale data transfer service that uses a semi-trailer truck to move extremely large amounts of data to the Amazon AWS cloud.

Clients can transfer up to 100 petabytes per Snowmobile, which consists of a 45-foot long rugged sized shipping container that connects to your datacenter via a fiber cable. All data is protected using 256-bit encryption, as well as dedicated security personnel, GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance and an optional escort security vehicle while in transit.

With a maximum bandwidth of 1Tb/s, filling up the entire 100PB of storage capacity takes ten days, so the whole process takes just a couple of weeks at most. Amazon argues this is significantly faster than the 20 years it would take to upload the same amount of data via a 1Gbps connection.
AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. Transferring data with Snowmobile is secure, fast and cost effective.

After an initial assessment, a Snowmobile will be transported to your data center and AWS personnel will configure it for you so it can be accessed as a network storage target. When your Snowmobile is on site, AWS personnel will work with your team to connect a removable, high-speed network switch from Snowmobile to your local network and you can begin your high-speed data transfer from any number of sources within your data center to the Snowmobile. After your data is loaded, Snowmobile is driven back to AWS where your data is imported into Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier.
Full details can be found at Amazon Snowmobile. A year ago, Amazon already revealed Snowball, a case that lets you transport up to 50TB of data in a secure way.



About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



Loading Comments